A Study On Combination Of Classical And Vernacular Language In Romance Of The Three Kingdoms

A study on the language features of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a treasure of Chinese culture, exerts great significance to the study of modern Chinese language. So far, a number of scholars have made in-depth and valuable exploration in its language features diachronically or synchronically, and obtained fruitful achievements. The thesis uses the version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms reviewed by Mao and published by People's Literature Publishing House in 1973 as the object of analysis, and explores and describes the language features by adopting qualitative and quantitative analyses as well as historical and horizontal comparisons. It is also attempted to reveal the language feature of classical and vernacular combination through a considerable amount of statistical materials. The thesis consists of five parts.Part one: introduction. The author introduces the research situation, significances and methodologies on the language features of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, generalizing the differences between classical and vernacular vocabulary.Part two: a general introduction to classical and vernacular language features in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The author makes research on the classical and vernacular features respectively from a macro scope. It is found that classical feature mainly lies in the use of monosyllabic words and classical phrases, while vernacular feature mainly lies in the rare use of uncommon words and infiltration of ancient vernacular words.Part three: an analysis of the classical and vernacular vocabulary of Romance of the Three Kingdoms from six typical classes. The author analyzes, compares and generalizes the features of modal particle, personal pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, structural particle, temporal adverb and aspect particle from a micro perspective. A number of examples and detailed statistics are used to fully showcase the language feature.Part four: a brief analysis of the influences and the causes of such language feature on the novel. The classical words are prior in the Three Kingdoms mainly because of the story time, the creative way and the identity of main characters in the novel. The vernacular words are inferior in the novel mainly because of publication time, the effects of civil processing to the stories, practicality of the article and the demand of personalities. Part Five: conclusion. The author concludes the paper and draws the conclusion: analyzed from vocabulary, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has the language feature of combination of classical and vernacular vocabulary. With the use of a large number of classical words, combined with an amount of ancient vernacular words, the novel is of a unique language feature.